This invention relates generally to unified receipt and notification of alerts generated by varied devices and applications for conveyance to a user, and more particularly to performing decision-theoretic notification for utilization with such unified alert receipt and notification.
Many computer users today receive information from a number of different sources, and utilize a number of different devices in order to access this information. For example, a user may receive e-mail and instant messages over a computer, pages over a pager, voice-mail over a phone, such as a cellular (xe2x80x9ccellxe2x80x9d) or landline phone, news information over the computer, etc. This makes it difficult for the user to receive all his or her different information, referred to also as alerts or notifications, wherever the user happens to be.
For example, a user may be away from his or her computer, but receive an important e-mail. The user may have access only to a cell phone or a pager, however. As another example, the user may be working on the computer, and have turned off the ringer and voice-mail indicator on the phone. When an important voice-mail is left, the user has no way of receiving this information on the computer.
Moreover, many of the alerts may not be important to the userxe2x80x94for example, an e-mail from the user""s manager or co-worker should often receive higher priority than the latest sports scores. More generally, the value of the information contained in an alert should be balanced with the costs associated with the disruption of the user by an alert. Both the costs and value may be context sensitive. Beyond notifications about communications, users are alerted with increasing numbers of services, error messages, and computerized offers for assistance, generated by systems and applications running on the local computer or on external computer and communication systems.
This invention relates to performing a decision-theoretic analysis to determine which notifications as can be received from notification sources should be conveyed to the user, and via which modes of which notification sinks. In one embodiment, a value is determined for each mode of each notification sink, equal to an expected value of information contained within the notification, minus an expected cost of disruption to convey the notification via each mode of each sink, minus an expected value of the user independently learning the information contained with the notification without notification, and minus an actual cost of conveying the notification via each mode of each sink. If this value is greater than a predetermined conveyance threshold for any mode of any sink, then the notification is conveyed via the mode of the sink having the highest such value. The invention includes computer-implemented methods, machine-readable media, computerized systems, and computers of varying scopes. Other aspects, embodiments and advantages of the invention, beyond those described here, will become apparent by reading the detailed description and with reference to the drawings.